A Way with Words

A nonprofit that promotes literacy in Reno, Nevada, held a spelling bee in which adult competitors were asked to spell words from books in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series. The author made up some of those words herself. But are they really words if they’re not in the dictionary? Yes, if it’s said or written and has a meaning, it’s a word. The word that took out a lot of the competitors was minuscule, which Rowling used in The Prisoner of Azkaban. In the United States, the word is usually spelled differently: miniscule.